A few minutes of grainy, black and white video show a shadowy creature with big eyes peeping over a windowsill. But does it show a puppet or an alien from outer space?

The video, purportedly capturing proof of alien life, was released this morning during a press conference at the Tivoli Student Union on the Auraria campus in downtown Denver.

Over the course of three minutes or so, the footage shows a white creature with a balloon-shaped head that keeps popping up and down in a windowsill that was 8 feet above ground. The face was white, with large black eyes that seemed to blink.

“If it was a puppet, it would be a very elaborate and sophisticated puppet,” said Alejandro Rojas, education director of MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network, who spoke at the press conference.

Rojas said the video was taken on July 17, 2003, in Nebraska by Stan Tiger Romanek, who set up the camera because he thought peeping Toms had been looking into his house at his two teenage daughters. Romanek did not appear at the news conference.

The creature would slowly pop its head up and peer through the window then drop suddenly down, apparently trying to avoid detection. It raised its head up about a half dozen times. The alien’s other body parts were not visible.

It was unclear whether the creature was taller than 8 feet and was crouching to avoid detection or whether it was standing on something. It also was difficult, because of the faintness of the object, to tell whether it was three dimensional.

Romanek, who moved to Colorado after the recording, claims to have had more than 100 encounters with aliens, Rojas said.

One of many websites detailing Romanek’s encounters shows photographs of him with red marks on his back and arms that Romanek says were inflicted by aliens. He says he was abducted by extraterrestrials and has posted pictures of spherical burn marks in his yard marking where a spaceship hovered or landed.

Since one encounter in which he photographed a UFO on a road trip to Pennsylvania, 44 birds have mysteriously crashed into his car window because of some bizarre electromagnetic effect resulting from the contact, he writes.

But Rojas said preliminary research that he and other experts have done on the video suggests that it is authentic.

“I don’t believe they have the ability or the motivation to fabricate a hoax,” Rojas said at the news conference.

About 30 journalists were in the room for the screening, including a dozen TV cameras. Photographers were not allowed to capture images from the footage today because experts are still reviewing it, Rojas said.

The screening, organized by Denver resident Jeff Peckman, was not open to the public.

Peckman says he hopes to provoke debate about the existence of extraterrestrial life.

“We believe this will be somewhat of an historic news conference,” Peckman said. “We’re very pleased to see this level of interest.”

A documentary is in production that will include much more of the videotape and other evidence, he says. It is due to be released later this year.

Peckman has organized an initiative drive to require the city of Denver to create an Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission to handle alien encounters, saying that the government has not disclosed all it knows about the existence of life beyond Earth.

During the press conference, Peckman frequently referenced the initiative. A petition drive is currently underway. Peckman needs 4,000 signatures for the item to make it onto the November ballot.

Peckman also said the technological benefits of making contact with extraterrestrials make it a very worthwhile endeavor.

Governments and industry giants have an incentive to keep a growing body of evidence of the existence of aliens hushed up, Peckman said, because the technology they could bring eclipses anything available on Earth.

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.

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